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I ran into a new problem today. I decided to give in to the constant "update me" reminders from the msn live messenger program. So i installed 2009 and all seemed well until I tried signing in. I couldn't sign in. I got no error (I'm running xpsp2) and so off it was to google. After some searching I found that a lot of people were having problems with 2009. Like ALOT. The problem is we get very little information when the sign in fails so it is hard to find the correct fix. I ended up uninstalling msn live 2009 (which was harder than it shouod be), and reinstalling windows live messenger 8.5.

I am a bit confused as to what exactly happened after that. I just hate this fucking program but Ive used it for so long that it is to important to stop using.

Needless to say 8.5 is working. I am sure during my attempts at fixing 2009 I screwed something else up.

See, this is something that I find interesting when talking to users... They seem to think that in order to USE a chat service that they HAVE to use THEIR messenger; which is generally not the case at all...

Instead of running 3-4 programs for chat, and see one of them croak from having to update it, you should just give Pidgin a try; it's a multi protocol IM program which supports just about any service I can think of; and it's multi platform and open source

I always knew about this. I guess, for me anyway, using messenger is just familiar territory that I don't HAVE to change. Though I only give it 2 strikes. If it fucks me over again its dead... or uninstalled.

I know that today every box comes with at least 2Gb DDRAM2 so memory usage is not that important, but on an old system every MB of RAM counts.

As I write this I'm using an old HP Omnibook 4100 with 98Mb of SDRAM and a 266Mhz processor so yeah memory usage is important to me so f**k all that Yahoo bloatware and the 25Mb it needs.

P.S.: If you're wandering what am I doing with this old laptop, well I just couldn't bring myself to throw it away. It's in perfect condition and although it can't do much on it's own, it's perfect to run RealVNC and connect to my home computer and run everything remotely.

In a world where vista recommends a minimum of 1gb ram (so much for that no system needing more than a couple MB quote bill gates) systems will come with more and more ram (I'm actually seeing consumer Mobo's that allow up to 32GB ram lol)... I'd love to see your everyday user who needs more than 4GB ram ...

Yeap, I'm running Win2K, it works ok. I'd probably get more speed with some linux distro, but compiling anything on this "beast" takes a lot of time and I'd probably have a hard time finding a distro that works on this ancient hardware.

You should give Ubuntu a shot; it's a great distro and apt has a boatload of binaries in its holding pen... Not saying you'd never compile again, but certainly makes life easier on older machines :P...

Yeh, my main goal when I was looking for a VNC agent was that it be Open Source, Feature Standards in the protocols associated, and work with Vinagre (the GUI VNC client that ships with Ubuntu).

You can even request that they mail you a copy of the Ubuntu CD's if you're unable to download/burn; but it takes like 3 weeks (though you get some kickass Ubuntu stickers to tag cars with)...

Well ubuntu is cool, but on 266Mhz and 98Mb of SDRAM is not going anywhere. Anyway, I gave up on Win2K, mostly because I was bored at work today and had nothing better to do, and tried different light distros that are recommended for old systems:

What I tried so far was: Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Wolvix and Vector Linux.

I decided to stay with Vector Linux mostly because it was able to configure pretty much everything during the install and comes with pretty much all I need already compiled. When you use an old system the less you have to compile, the better. Compiling takes FOR EVER. As an example, I spent one and a half hours to compile pidgin on Vector Linux and pidgin has like an 8Mb source.

Puppy Linux is very nice and fast, the only problem was that it doesn't like the laptop's cdrom and for some unknown reason wouldn't continue the install. Searched their forums, some other people have had the same problem but no one knows why. On a different box ran with no problems what so ever, fast and with a very nice GUI.

Wolvix site looks great, they have a great forum, but I couldn't get it to run, booted up on two different boxes but with no success. Errors during boot and then it freezes. I did not have enough time to take a closer look at it and figure it out, but it does look promising.

Damn Small Linux is also another light distro. As expected it ran very smooth, since it's under 100Mb. I like it but since their focus was to keep everything small and fast, some packages are out of date and it would require a lot of updating and compiling which just won't work for me.

I plan on trying Arch Linux and some other distros. Maybe I should start another topic with distro reviews.